Do you currently run or plan to run events that need to accept registrations, such as workshops, group classes, charity fundraisers, social conferences, or even a large-scale event such as a school concert, a sporting or religious event, or any kind of event where people need to book to attend?
Co-ordinating event sign-ups can be a complex process. You will probably have to manage event schedules, dates, registration numbers, data collection and admin, payment processing and invoicing, confirmations, reminders and notifications, refunds and cancellations … perhaps even accommodating special needs and delivering tickets to participants.
There are many benefits to setting up an online event registration system. It can make your business more efficient, save time and lower costs, help you easily copy settings for repeat events, give event managers more control, create a better user experience and grow your sales.
The problem is that setting this up can be quite costly.
The good news is that if you run a WordPress-based website or blog, you can download and install a very inexpensive and highly professional online event registration system.
Introducing …
Event Espresso
Plugin Description
The Event Espresso online event registration plugin for WordPress allows you to easily set up multiple events and begin processing online bookings in just a few minutes.
(Event Espresso lets you set up multiple events and take online bookings)
Event Espresso is a feature-rich software that gives you full control over your event registration management process.
Create custom registration forms
You can employ multiple event registration strategies, from simple online enrolments and straight up selling tickets, to setting up custom registration forms in order to better understand your event participants, or integrating your event registration forms with an autoresponder system for ongoing notifications.
View detailed information about your event attendees
Please Note: At the time of writing this review, Event Espresso supports two different versions of their software: Event Espresso 3 and Event Espresso 4. The new Event Espresso 4 is significantly different than the older Event Espresso 3, as the software is being rebuilt using a different structure to accommodate future growth and expansion. The EE 4 plugin platform has different features, user interface, data structure, coding method and price. The company plans to eventually transition completely to EE 4, so keep this in mind as you learn more about this plugin.
More info:
Benefits
Here are just a few of the benefits and advantages of using Event Espresso to manage event registrations on your website or blog:
Hands-Free Event Registration Management And Ticketing System
Event Espresso provides you with everything you need to turn your current digital presence into a feature-rich and professional event management website … from custom registration forms and automated emails, to maximum seating limits, multiple pricing options and discount codes, to printable tickets and seating charts.
Higher Business Productivity
By using an online event registration system like Event Espresso, you save time and improve your business productivity by practically eliminating the need to process registrations manually.
Essentially, you are facilitating attendees to perform the registration on their own.
Letting your customers to do the data themselves frees up your time and lets you concentrate more of your resources on creating a more enjoyable event.
Full Control Over The User Experience
As you will learn shortly, Event Espresso gives you complete control over the event management process that you want your clients to experience.
Additional plugin benefits include the following:
- Reduced Costs: Event Espresso is a very low cost online event registration management solution compared to building your own system or using a third-party service. The cost is kept to a minimum through a model where Event Espresso users purchase the core plugin (which suits the needs of most users) and then buy add-ons only when you need additional features.
- Higher Sales: With Event Espresso you can accept online sign-ups 24/7. In addition, Event Espresso social sharing and marketing features and add ons (see below) let people who are interested in attending your event share your information with others who may also be interested.
- Green Event SignUp Process: With Event Espresso, your event registration process remains entirely in digital form, significantly reducing typical paper consumption from tasks related to enrollment.
- All Data Belongs To You. You own all the information collected from event attendees.
Plugin Features
Event Espresso provides functionality to its users via standard features (these are included with the plugin) and additional features that customers can purchase, called add-ons.
Event Espresso offers many features to WP users. Here are just some of these:
- Fast and simple to install and implement. Be up and running in no time.
- Multiple Times and Dates Per Event. In Event Espresso 4, events can have multiple dates and times (datetimes), which these can be managed from a single event.
- Event Calendar. Registrants can easily see your events and add these to their schedule with the calendar.
- Collect Payments. Event Espresso provides integration with leading payment gateways, enabling you to collect payments prior to running the events.
- Smart Single Page Checkout Process. The Event Espresso 4 checkout process is fast and intuitive. Registrants are given the option to automatically duplicate the primary attendee’s registration information for any additional participants.
- Default Price Types. Price types allow event managers to create new prices that adjust the base ticket price of the system-default ticket.
- Mobile Ticketing Apps. The Event Espresso mobile registration system enables you to authenticate tickets, speed up door registrations, create multiple check-in “stations” and track all participants.
- Contact Profiles And Contact List. Event Espresso 4 provides you with the tools to understand who your clients are and how you’ve done past business with your customers. Your Contact Profile section stores the name, biography, contact details, event registration details, private comments, etc. about each client.
- Waiting Lists. Prospective participants can subscribe to a waiting list if your event has reached the maximum number of participants. Additionally, you can specify that wait-listed registrants pay for their spots if you plan to expand capacity for the event.
- Event RSS Feeds. Automatically update your site visitors, bring in more visitors and expand your content distribution with the built-in XML RSS events feed.
- SEO Friendly Event Page Web Links. Keyword rich event page URLs take advantage of your Permalinks configuration settings. Search engine friendly web links with relevant keywords enhance the context of your content and is favored by search engines, helping you get a more targeted audience to your events.
- Your Organization Settings. you can configure your organization’s profile to be deployed throughout the software and your front-end templates. The organization fields include: company name, street address, city, state, country, zip code, email address, phone, VAT/tax number, logo, Facebook URL, Twitter profile URL, LinkedIn URL, Pinterest profile URL, Google+ URL, Instagram profile URL.
- Exportable Data. You can output all of your data collected from your event attendees into Excel or CSV format for creating reports, devising new marketing strategies, analyzing attendee statistics, and so on.
- Register Multiple Event Attendees. Event Espresso 4 allows an individual or people to enroll multiple attendees simultaneously. Event managers decide how many attendees can enroll in a single booking session by specifying either a limit on ticket purchases per order, or per-ticket minimums and maximums.
- A Community Of Event Experts. Event Espresso lets you engage with an expert community of experienced event managers and other plugin users. You can engage with other members of the Event Espresso community through their community chat room, support forums, job board, and social media discussions on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.
- Social Sharing. Event participants and website visitors can help increase exposure for your events using social share buttons.
- Event Posts. Publish your events using pages or posts and take advantage of WordPress custom post types. You can even customize the page templates to display event information in your own unique way.
Extra features include:
- Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). Event Espresso is simple enough for non-technical WordPress users, and also robust and customizable for enterprise-level users and web-based software developers. The bottom line is that by using OOP, Event Espresso 4 facilitates more complex developments and customizations to the application.
- Maintenance Mode. You can pause registrations for regular site visitors whenever you need to make changes on your site. You can still work on the back-end of your site during maintenance mode.
- Flexibility, Autonomy & Value: According to the philosophy stated on their website, Event Espresso’s aim is to “empower business and organization leaders with the event registration, ticketing and management tools that maximize the success of events.” To achieve their mission, the software has been built using a model that provides users with great autonomy and flexibility and delivers value for money in the process.
The premium version of Event Espresso also provides you with over 40 additional features, including:
- Email shortcodes for including registrant data in emails and updates.
- Question groups that make it easy to reuse a common set of questions for similar events.
- Option to skip the confirmation page in registration.
Add-Ons
As mentioned earlier, Event Espresso provides “addons”, which allow you to further expand the functionality of the event management system.
Some of these add-ons include:
- Events Vector Maps Template Add on: The Vector Maps custom events list template allows you to display scheduled events by location. There are four maps available: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
- Recurring Events Management Add-on: The Recurring Events management add on lets you put your events on autopilot by scheduling recurring events weeks or months in advance. You can schedule as many events in advance as you need. Event Espresso will automatically open and close bookings for all of these recurring events.
- Events Category Accordion Template Addon: The Category Accordion template displays event categories in a simple list. Clicking on a category name shows the events associated with that category and closes any previously open categories.
- Social Media Buttons Add-on: The social media add-on displays Facebook, Twitter and Google+ buttons in your events. The Social Media addon comes free with all of the Event Espresso support licenses.
- Custom Template Addon: The Custom Template add on is capable of displaying your events in a variety of visually exciting ways.
- Seating Chart Add-on: The seating chart add on is for venues and events that sell and reserve seats for attendees in advance. This is ideal for venues and events such as theaters, concert halls, play houses, sports arenas and stadiums. The Seating Chart add-on allows you to promote reserved or assigned seating to your events and venues from your WordPress website. The Seating Chart addon lets you manage the environment for your customers and design assigned seating charts and attach a single price to each seat.
- EE4 Event Ticketing & Bar Scanning Add on: The Ticketing add-on gives you the ability to create tickets with bar codes. The Bar Scanning addon gives you the capacity to scan ticket bar codes. The ticketing add on includes the ability to customize event tickets. Multiple barcode types are included for handling check-in scans at the door. People can either print out their tickets or display them on their mobile devices. The barcode scanner can be used for checking in or checking out registrants and to validate tickets.
- Events Calendar Add-on: This WordPress events calendar displays events and event categories using a nice graphical calendar.
- Infusionsoft Integration Addon: With the Event Espresso 4 Infusionsoft integration all-in-one sales and marketing software add-on, you can completely automate your customer relations and email marketing campaigns to seamlessly capture event attendee data, track bookings, and accept payments from your Event Espresso powered website.
Note: The Event Espresso development team is continually adding new features and improvements to its plugin, including new addons.
To learn more about the latest Event Espreso features and add-ons, check out the plugin here:
Customer Feedback
Here are some of the many great testimonials that satisfied customers have posted about Event Espresso:
”Congratulations on an absolutely fantastic plugin. I’m really impressed with its functionality and add on features and will definitely upgrade my client’s production site to the premium version (when ready for launch) to incorporate all the features. As I have told another client “this plugin is the cat’s meow”.” Pete Mansel
”I have to say that it has been the right choice for me…I’ve been extremely pleased with the way my site is working.” Robin, RobinTime
”I played around with the free version for a couple hours then purchased the Pro for a client. Love it and so do they! Sweetest Event plugin I have tried.” Bill Chambers, Bill Chambers Design
Event Espresso Tips
Whether you are an education services provider, presenter, show planner, or event professional, there are just countless possibilities of what you can do with the Event Espresso plugin.
After downloading your copy of the plugin and becoming a licensed owner, search the support forum for inspiration and practical ways to improve your event management workflow and improve the experience of your registrants.
Support
Event Espresso works with with other WordPress plugins and WordPress themes that follow WP coding standards. If you have problems with the plugin, however, you will find that Event Espresso provides excellent support, as so many of its plugin customers attest:
”By far, the customer service experience with Event Espresso has been the best of any WordPress Theme or Paid Plugin that I’ve used in the past two years!” Megan Murray, Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe
Event Espresso provides comprehensive support that includes access to a support forum, in-depth online documentation with faqs, knowledgebase and how tos, email support and even a monthly VIP member pass giving you access to community of developers, designers, event managers, publishers and webmasters that use Event Espresso tools, plus faster support response times.
Additionally, Event Espresso boasts an established team of experienced web developers with a solid track record of support, so this is definitely a plugin you can depend on to organize and manage your events.
Product License Pricing
Event Espresso is available in various editions, including a FREE basic edition (named Event Espresso Decaf). For personal support and advanced software options, however, you may want to consider using one of the ”Pro” plugin versions below:
- Personal License – This allows you to run Event Espresso on one site only. Includes 51+ Premium features, (addons sold separately) and one year of upgrades and support. Cost = $69.95.
- Everything License – This license option enables you to configure Event Espresso on one domain only. Includes 51+ Premium features, 29 Premium add-ons and 1 year of upgrades and support. Price = $279.95.
- Developer Licensing – This edition enables you to configure Event Espresso on 5 sites. Includes 51+ Premium features, (add ons sold separately) and 1 year of upgrades and support. Cost = $249.95.
The cost to purchase the Event Espresso plugin can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. Presently, the plugin is selling for the pricing shown above. Check the plugin’s website for the current pricing details: Event Espresso – Event Manager & Ticket Registration System For WordPress
Note: The above reflects the pricing when this article was written. This may not be the actual pricing charged by the plugin seller when you visit the site.
Additional Information
Event Espresso regularly adds new features and improvements to the software. Make sure to stay subscribed to their customer update list to receive the latest information and updates.
Look up the software’s documentation pages for answers to common questions about setting up and using Event Espresso, and the support forums for questions related to a particular use-case, or to notify developers about issues and share feedback.
For detailed documentation, demos, downloads, videos, tutorials, FAQ and more, visit the Event Espresso website.
Our Recommendation
Event Espresso is the preferred WordPress event booking and ticketing manager plugin, used and trusted by thousands of businesses.
If you are a WordPress user and you currently run events that involve managing dates, times and venues (offline and online), registering attendees, and selling tickets or seating, then you will probably not find a more suitable plugin for your needs than Event Espresso.
For complete details, visit the plugin website here: Event Espresso – WordPress Event Registration And Ticket Management Software
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